Emotional Investment
Emotional Investment
It is interesting that in this time of pandemic crisis that the two gold standards evoked for mobilization and solution in America are the Manhattan Project and the moon landing. I'm selecting the latter for today's topic of emotional investment, because it has elements very fitting for the theme I want to develop.
President John F. Kennedy announced May 25, 1961 the goal of America going to the moon by the end of the decade. He was charismatic and inspiring. Most presidents in most times could not have excited or motivated a nation to try something so extreme, so dangerous, so expensive. But, he inspired adventure in a culture hungry for adventure, a country inspired to do 50-mile hikes on his bidding for fitness, a country enamored with Camelot! And a country locked in a harshly competitive cold war with the Soviet Union, a threatening nuclear rival.
Kennedy admitted privately that he didn't give a damn about the moon, all that he wanted was to make sure that the Soviets didn't get there first, achieving dominance over us. Indeed, the momentum for the moon shot started to wane after the expenses involved started to become apparent and as social ferment began in those earliest of stages. His speeches started to shift subtly to not even mentioning the moon, but speaking of going to space and on the day that he was assassinated, his speech in Dallas was going to speak of the journey of America to space, not the journey to the moon by the end of the decade.
His assassination changed the course of American history in oh so many ways! He was a great orator, a great charismatic leader, but he was replaced by a new President that had a very different skill set, his Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson. His oratory was replaced by a great legislator. And that great legislator had a tremendous tool in his kit that appeared with Kennedy's death, the tool of grieving emotion becoming rage, bewilderment and a sense of deep need. Powerful emotions had to be invested somewhere!
He used that masterfully, used it as motivation to put through his Great Society initiatives. But, he also used it to put through something that he reportedly championed, something that Kennedy had actually let go of, the goal of landing on the moon by the end of the decade! He got the money appropriated to accomplish this insanely extreme objective. The Mercury Project was complete during Kennedy's tenure, the series of astronauts put in orbit as individuals. Johnson pushed NASA, congress and the American taxpayers forward to the Gemini Project and then to the Apollo Project.
The question comes up, as it did to Johnson, if America was full bore behind this, why was each stage of this taking so damned long? Because no one had ever done it before. Having never done it before uncovered what science has to do with its process of discovery. No, science doesn't first have to find the answers, science has to find the questions! It took each stage of development to open knowledge to the point of asking the next questions which needed to be answered.
The fuel of such an expensive, dangerous and grueling process requires emotional investment. After we beat the Russians to the moon, after we accomplished that goal made so emotionally engraved in our psyches by Kennedy's death, the space program has really petered out. If we had maintained that level of commitment of resources, that intensity, we would not be better people, but we would be on Mars. Instead, we have been riding many of the advances of that period and healing the social wounds and divisions of the sixties ever since.
Now the coronavirus. It requires, at best, a level of emotional investment to solve it that challenges the uncommitted people we have become. It requires a different response. The moon shot required a response of action from people feeding energy into a scientific, political and engineering machine to accomplish. Work by the individual was the outlet. The coronavirus pandemic is more difficult in many ways, because it requires isolation from action, isolation from work, isolation from activity in general. It is harder to make an emotional investment in it that will last through the entire crisis, but there is no choice. It is a huge challenge, thus it is compared here to the moon shot.
We must renew our commitment daily. It is a different emotional investment, one of unity and endurance. My well being is dependent in large part on your investment, as your well being depends so much on mine. Extremity is a great generator of emotional investment and effective leaders surge to the fore in such times while pretenders fall to the wayside. We see this playing out before our eyes.
This time, I think it will be an investment that potentially makes us better people, not just more powerful. And, this time we have the motivation of no effective alternative!
This one contains The Right Stuff!! God but I loved that movie and those times and this is a great example of how that investment paid huge dividends to mankind. IMHO too few people are making an adequate investment in the pandemic - which is a bit scary.
ReplyDeleteI believe you are correct that the investment is a bit less than we need, but it is interesting that people are doing better than the models assumed. Not a good faith in Americans apparently.
ReplyDeleteWe have the counterpart of sorts in our Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has got most of India to support him in his battle with the current virus and the results are there for all to see. For a country of 1.3 billion plus people to have shown such low instances of fatality is primarily due to the emotional investment that the public has extended to the lockdown and the resultant hardships. We have our lunatics trying to sabotage for political gains but, by and large the investment is there and working. At least, so far.
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